From "Heart of Darkness" (1902)

by Joseph Conrad

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the
world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An
empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm,
thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The
long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed
distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side
by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you
lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long
against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched
and cut off forever from everything you had known once -- somewhere -- far away
-- in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back
to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself;
but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with
wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and
water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a
peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.

* * * * *

On we went again into the silence, along empty reaches, round the still bends,
between the high walls of our winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the
ponderous beat of the stern wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive,
immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the
stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on
the floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet
it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small,
the grimy beetle crawled on -- which was just what you wanted it to do.

* * * * *

The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped
leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper
and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet in there.... The
dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness.... We were
wanderers on prehistoric earth, and on an earth that wore the aspect of an
unknown planet.... The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black
and incomprehensible frenzy.... We were cut off from comprehension of our
surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as
sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not
understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were
traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving
hardly a sign -- and no memories.

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form
of a conquered monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing monstrous
and free. It was unearthly, and the men were -- No, they were not
inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it -- this suspicion of
their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and
leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the
thought of their humanity -- like yours -- the thought of your remote
kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly
enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself
that there was in your just the faintest trace of a response to the
terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in
it which
you -- you so remote from the night of the first ages -- could comprehend.